What is Application Security?

Application security is a core component of a wider DevSecOps progam.

DevSecOps is built on three foundational pillars: people, processes, and technologies. DevSecOps is based on DevOps, and include specialized tools and processes that encourage collaboration between developers (Dev), security professionals (Sec), and operation teams (Ops) to build software that is both efficient and secure. DevSecOps brings cultural transformation that makes security a shared responsibility for everyone who is building the software.

These three pillars work together through automation and continuous security testing to create a strong, secure, and evolving development program.

People: Security-first culture and collaboration

In DevSecOps, organizations must build a security-first culture where security is everyone's responsibility, not just the security team's. Developers own the security of the applications they build, operations teams own the security of running workloads and infrastructure, and security teams own security for the organization. This collaborative approach ensures there is defined security ownership across operations, security, and development teams and the organization more broadly.

Security culture

Embedding a security culture and mindset across roles, departments, and programs is an essential part of application security. A wide security culture embeds visibility  through security champion programs, collaborative security design reviews, post-incident reviews, and learning processes for continuous improvement.

Frequent, role-based security training

Training must be provided to individuals and teams involved in the software development lifecycle, across developers, security, and operations teams. AppSec security training may include secure coding practices, threat modeling, vulnerability management, and learning triggered by code commits or security findings.

Involving security early in the SDLC

Security must be integrated into application design from as early as the ideation phase. This includes threat modelling and design reviews to help product teams define and incorporate security requirements into user stories and acceptance criteria.

Processes: Automated security integration

Establishing application security processes is essential to help protect applications and sensitive data. Clear and transparent security guidelines allow developers to mitigate security issues within the code and implement functional application security controls.

Policy-as-code frameworks

The organization as a whole should define and automatically enforce security requirements throughout the development lifecycle. This includes Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates for operations teams that define security configurations. These templates help ensure applications are automatically validated for security before deployment.

Automated security checks

Automated security testing embeds security checks into every stage of the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. These can include:

• Quality gates: A level of quality that the software product must meet at a certain phase. For example, all libraries must be up to date before an application enters production, to ensure there are no vulnerable and outdated components.
• Bug bars: A threshold level for security issues within the application. For example, the software must not not have any security vulnerabilities ranked ‘high’ or above before release, to remove the risk of likely security threats.
• Quality checks: Tests and scans to check against quality gates and bug bars.
• Continuous compliance scanning: A scanner that automatically checks against standards like System and Organization Controls 2 (SOC 2), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and the GDPR.

Real-time security monitoring and response

In DevSecOps processes, it is possible to create and build in automated incident response workflows, self-healing capabilities, and continuous security posture assessment. Within these workflows, you can add automated remediation for low-risk and low-complexity findings. For other findings, automated flags can be sent to developers or ticketing systems.

Intelligent risk management

In-application security risk management uses automated risk scoring to prioritize security findings. This risk scoring evaluation is based on each vulnerability’s business impact and exploitability. This process highlights critical vulnerabilities for developer attention.

Adaptive security protections and mitigations

For organizations with a mature DevSecOps program, each application’s security can be adapted independently. Project leaders and intelligent systems can dynamically adjust security requirements based on the application context, user behavior, and new threats. With this process, new security requirements become repeatable and automated across new and existing software development projects.

Technologies: Cloud-native security automation

Modern applications use traditional and cloud-native technologies and AI-driven automation to provide enhanced security.

Automated security tests

Standard software security tests should be deployed across projects. These automated tests include:

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

Static Application Security Testing scans codebases for known vulnerabilities.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

Dynamic Application Security Testing scans running applications for vulnerabilities.

Interactive application security testing (IAST)

Interactive application security testing examine code outputs at runtime based on user interaction.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Software Composition Analysis scans open-source dependencies for vulnerabilities.

Container and infrastructure security

Container and infrastructure security considers the security of the underlying components the software runs on. Within this infrastructure management, you can combine security measures such as:

• Container security scanning with runtime protection
• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) for continuous configuration monitoring
• Automated secrets management platforms that rotate credentials and eliminate hardcoded secrets
• Penetration testing and other live tests

Zero-trust architecture

Designing applications with a zero trust architecture helps to reduce permissions-based software vulnerabilities. Components of a zero trust architecture include:

• Network micro-segmentation with identity-based access controls
• Service mesh security with inter-service encryption of communication

A zero trust architecture helps enforce security policies across distributed and cloud-based applications.

AI-powered threat detection and analytics

Organizations can use machine learning (ML) algorithms and behavioral analytics further enhance the security of applications.

For example, AI and ML services can help detect anomalous patterns in real time, including insider threats or compromised accounts indicated by abnormal access. These services also help reduce the number of alerts through vulnerability correlation and prioritization.

Developers can use these methods to secure software applications from unauthorized access and other risks. 

Code security

Static and dynamic code analysis are fundamental to identifying vulnerabilities before applications reach full software release. Development teams integrate automated security testing tools directly into their development workflows to scan source code, compiled applications, and running systems for security flaws.

These application security tools detect common vulnerabilities. For instance, in web application security, testing must include SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and insecure configurations. In mobile application security testing, security considerations in testing might include on-device storage tests. These tools can highlight vulnerabilities while providing developers with actionable remediation guidance.

For example, developers use Amazon Q Developer code reviews or Amazon Inspector Code Security to automatically identify security vulnerabilities and coding best practices violations during code reviews, providing intelligent recommendations to improve application security posture.

Dependency management

Third-party libraries and open-source components introduce significant security risks through known vulnerabilities and license compliance issues. Organizations implement comprehensive dependency scanning and management processes to maintain visibility into all external components used in their applications.

These processes include automated vulnerability detection, license compliance monitoring, and secure update mechanisms that ensure dependencies remain current with security patches.

For example, development teams use Amazon Inspector Code Security to continuously assess dependencies in code and container images for vulnerabilities, automatically generating detailed findings with remediation guidance.

Infrastructure security

Cloud infrastructure misconfigurations represent one of the most common sources of security breaches in modern applications.

Teams can use Amazon Inspector Code Security to implement continuous monitoring and automated remediation to ensure their cloud resources maintain secure configurations throughout their lifecycle. This includes validating security group rules, encryption settings, access policies, and compliance with organizational security standards.

AWS Config can also be used to continuously monitor and evaluate AWS resource configurations against security best practices, automatically detecting deviations and triggering remediation workflows to maintain compliance.

Continuous integration and continuous deployment

Modern applications are deployed to the cloud using CI/CD pipelines. To reduce risk in application deployments, teams can use services such as AWS CodePipeline. CodePipeline can integrate with security scanning services for continuous security validation at every stage of the deployment process. This includes automated static code analysis, dependency vulnerability scanning, container image security assessments, and infrastructure-as-code security reviews before deployment.

AWS CodeBuild can integrate with third-party security tools to perform comprehensive security testing during building and testing applications. Additionally, implementing policy-as-code with AWS CloudFormation Guard ensures that infrastructure deployments automatically comply with security standards. This prevents insecure configurations from reaching production, helping to maintain security consistency across all deployment stages.